 Coming up on DTNS, should Twitter add a subscription model? Why DoorDash bought a robot company that does not do delivery robots and transparent wood? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 8th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And from the increasingly lighter forests of Finland. I'm Patrick Winshaw. Hi, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. We were just having a talk about Super Bowl and about Joe Montana video games and what they call football in various parts of the world. If you want that wider conversation, become a member. Get our Good Day Internet show. It's full of fun. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Pinellas County, Florida, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said Monday that someone gained remote access to the Oldsmar, Florida water treatment plant at 8 a.m. February 5th and an attempt to increase the level of sodium hydroxide to a dangerous level. A plant operator first thought a supervisor had access the system from home. After the intruder raised the amount of sodium hydroxide, the operator immediately reduced it back. The remote access program has since been disabled. The sheriff noted other fail-saves and alarm systems would have also prevented the dangerous adjustment had the operator not noticed. Yeah, look that systems working. Nice. Hyundai and its affiliate Kia said it is not in talks with Apple to develop an autonomous vehicle. In regulatory filings Monday, Hyundai said it was in talks with multiple companies about autonomous EVs, but no decisions had been made. Hyundai statements are almost identical to what it said last month about Apple, which could mean the company did have talks with Apple but isn't right now and Apple isn't at the point to sign any deals yet. So we'll just wait until somebody announces something for sure. Tesla did announce it would begin accepting Bitcoin from customers quote, subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis and quote, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed Monday. Tesla also bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, which the company says will offer more flexibility to further diversify and maximize returns on its cash. Greatfire.org, which monitors censorship reports that the API for the audio based social app Clubhouse is now blocked in China. Please check your overunders to find out if you bet right. The app's website remained available last we saw. The app was not officially listed in China's app store very soon after it launched, but the app could previously be used without a VPN in the country. Now you just need to use a VPN, I guess. The beta release of iOS 14.5 now supports setting a default music streaming service for Siri. The first time a user asks her to play a song, the voice assistant will ask to set a default service. Or if a user specifies a service, the first time they ask, Siri will set that service as the default. All right, let's talk a little more about facial recognition. A new paper from Mozilla fellow Deborah Raji and U.S. Congressional Technology fellow Genevieve Freed looked at 130 different facial recognition datasets over several decades to examine how the data was collected and labeled and give us some historical perspective. Here's what they found. They broke down the history of facial collection into four phases. First phase went from 1964, the first time this was ever done into the mid 1990s characterized by manual collection with universal consent. You brought somebody in. You said, can I take your photograph? You took the photograph. Second phase included the U.S. Defense Department funded face recognition technology database or Ferret database, which collected 14,000 images from 1,200 people increasing through the late 2000s. 86% of the images in that data set had consent. Third phase started along with, you know, the web 2.0 social networking craze in 2007 with the labeled faces in the wild data set scraped imaging from the web. So Google Flickr, Yahoo! That also included mug shots and only 31% of the images from these larger data sets had consent. Metadata was manually generated in all three of those phases. The final phase that they studied, phase four, began with Facebook's 2014 deep face model that used user photos from within Facebook and deep learning for identification. That improved the accuracy of facial recognition quite a bit and introduced auto-generated labels, which are not as accurate. It also was a low for user consent, 8.7% of images. Now they really hammer away at this consent part of this, but it's interesting to me to note that back in 2007, the attitude was, hey, everybody's sharing their images on Flickr with Creative Commons. As long as you attribute where it came from, you can just take it. It was the gestalt of the time of, hey, we're all contributing data so that everybody can access it and we can innovate more. And since that time, our ideas and our thoughts on privacy have evolved, I would say. And so what was non-controversial in 2007 and then accelerated by Facebook in 2014 is now considered to be something problematic, which is just because you have access to a photo of my face doesn't mean I want you to be using it in a facial recognition database. Yeah, it's interesting that these days, more people than ever understand that this happens and for the most part how it works, yet the fewest amount of people are consenting and there's just more data overall. Back in 2007, I mean, not much of a Flickr user anymore, but I was pretty heavy into that whole thing and I would have been super gung-ho about contributing to making this technology smarter. Go ahead, use my photos. All good stuff. If you're going to print it in a magazine, I want a little money, but otherwise, I was part of the solution. I don't totally feel the same way anymore, but I don't know, Patrick, what are your thoughts? I wonder if a Creative Commons image is considered to be consent okay, right? Because you say, go ahead, use it for anything you want. In the case of Facebook, you kind of consent because you agree to the user agreement and we could argue about whether or not you actually understand what the user agreement is, but you kind of consent as well by using the service. So to me, the thing that really changes, is it necessarily the explicit consent, it's the relationship we have to these kinds of uses. And that is what I take away from it. It's back then, as you said, Tom, it was like, yeah, let's all make the world better together. Now it's like, wait, you're going to do what? With my pictures? No, I didn't give you the authorization to do that. So that's more of my takeaway. Yeah, go ahead. I wonder if Facebook had existed in that form in, you know, back in the Flickr days, would people have been less frustrated by these kinds of data collections for the modeling? Yeah, I think it has to do with contemplated use, right? Or with your Facebook example, informed consent, right? Yeah, I gave consent that you could use my images, but I didn't think you would use it for that. And so I think when I say our thinking has evolved, that's what I mean. We didn't contemplate all the uses that facial recognition databases would be put to when we applied a Creative Commons license or uploaded a photo to Facebook. And you can debate whether that gives you any right to complain or not. That's a whole matter of opinion, but it certainly is something that if you had asked people in 2007, I don't think anyone without prodding would have volunteered the idea of, oh, right, someday there'll be facial recognition databases that will be used to violate my privacy. Maybe I won't, you know, put my photo up on Flickr for anybody to take. It just wasn't thought of that way. And honestly, as we get this large scale, right, you can't collect the amount of faces in the old way of doing it manually that you can by just scraping the web. That improves your data set, but it doesn't improve the accuracy of your metadata. It doesn't necessarily improve the accuracy of your algorithm because now you may have a tilted version because you scraped them from the web. You're only getting people who had access to the web and so they may not be as good at identifying the kinds of people who didn't have access to the web at the time that you scraped them. Scientists at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory or CSAIL have developed a combination of deposition printers and laser cutters to instantly fabricate drones and robots. And they call it laser factory. Laser factory software lets a user design a device from a library of components with the ability to draw cut lines and also circuits. The laser factory then cuts out the parts, in some cases even handling folding parts, prints lines of silver for circuits, places components where they need to be, then laser cures the silver which results in a device that's ready for use. The video from CSAIL shows a drone taking off and flying immediately after being constructed. It flies. The key is a hardware assembly that includes ways to extrude silver and pick up and place objects. That assembly can be added to the head of a commercial laser cutter. The scientists want to improve the circuit training to allow for more complex and denser devices. And the team would also like to incorporate 3D printing. That's sort of the next step. Yeah, so you have to have some components on hand. This isn't 3D printing the drone. So there's some preparation, but it's a faster assembly, right? Yeah, I think it seems like a really interesting first step into a house factory kind of like you can almost have a little assembly line that is completely automated in your home if you want to or in your garage at least because yeah, you do need some parts that the machine can't do itself. Some of them are in the example of the drone. The propellers, for example, aren't made by the machine. One can imagine that at some point a 3D printer could do that, but there's also the motor is not made by the machine stuff like that. But it feels like it's essentially in the same way that a 3D printer is kind of a home, I don't know, carving device that you couldn't imagine before. This is kind of a home factory line that could construct more complex things than a 3D printer can. And the circuit tracing is really interesting. The folding of some parts is really interesting. When you kind of deconstruct what it does, it's a lot, I think it's a little bit more basic than you imagine when you think of the end result. But it's still really interesting and I'm very curious to see where it goes in the next few years. Yeah, compared to a science fiction movie, not that impressive. It's not in fact a replicator or anything like that. But it can do a lot more than just an automated assembly line. It can do some etching. It can do the deposition of the circuits. And just the fact that it knows how to grab the right parts and put them in the right place based on the software that you put it together, I mean, that's in advance too. I think, yeah, our natural tendency, certainly mine, is to be like, yeah, but what if you could print the entire thing? And the team's like, yeah, we'd like to get there too. But we think we've made it advance with what we got here. And it seems I don't think there's any reason they couldn't get there. And once you integrate into that assembly line, a 3D printing station, you really start doing interesting stuff even more. Yeah. I like the idea that you could just have a bucket of parts and this machine out in the field. And as you need more drones for like a search and rescue operation, just print them up. DoorDash has acquired chowbotics, mostly known for a salad making robot called Sally. How clever. That's the one that chooses ingredients from bins to assemble bowls of salad and other bowl-friendly items. DoorDash seems to intend to offer chowbotics to partner restaurants saying it will, quote, enhance our robust merchant offerings and logistics platform and, quote, it's potentially a nice add-on for so-called dark kitchens to speed up meal preparation. It's unclear if chowbotics will continue to operate as its own entity within DoorDash. Yeah, the version of chowbotics is kind of a vending machine looking thing. But to what I think you're about to say, Sarah, the whole dark kitchen thing could certainly benefit from it. Yeah, dark kitchen, ghost kitchen, the idea that there is a place somewhere that as a customer, even when restaurants open up again around the world, you don't go into. It just, food gets prepared there and then it's all made for delivery. Makes a lot of sense, especially because a salad, well, it depends on the salad, right? But many of them are like, get all the ingredients into one thing, shake it up, good to go. So it's perhaps some of the most assembly-lined food that's out there. So yeah, I think this is a pretty smart acquisition. Yeah, I'm fascinated by the idea that DoorDash, rather than trying to replace the restaurant or extend robotics into the delivery side and replace the driver is also, because I think they're probably doing both of that maybe, but also saying we could become a supplier of things that our clients, the restaurants, could use to make their product better. I think that's super smart. I mean, the long-term goal has to be, at least to some extent, just like Uber and Lyft and whoever, the holy grail for them is to have self-driving cars because you cut down costs significantly, right? Imagine if you can have self-making food. Well, that doesn't work as well, but robots that make the food. And of course, DoorDash is not the look of a sudden, I'm gonna say, we only sell you stuff that was made automatically, but if that's one option among the many restaurants that they will deliver from, their own auto-making sandwich or easy-to-prepare food down the line within a few years, I think they would like that very much and the acquisition of Childbotics makes sense in that context. Yeah, I mean, think of DoorDash as a platform, right? And the platform serves not just us, the people who eat the food, but also the restaurants. And if the restaurants see DoorDash as a partner that's gonna help them make their restaurant operation better, they're more likely to wanna use DoorDash than they are to fight against those high delivery fees and all that. Hey, folks, if you wanna join in the conversation in our Discord, you can talk about this and all kinds of other fun stuff with the folks there. Just link your Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Well, it's no secret, Twitter's been looking at subscription options. We've talked about it before on the show. They wanna diversify their revenue away from just advertising. The company has surveyed users about it and mentioned it on earnings calls. So yeah, they make money from ads, they make money from data analysis, but man, that's subscription revenue. That's sweet, sweet, never-expiring subscription revenue that just recurs. It's very tempting for Twitter. Bloomberg sources describe a few of the options Twitter is exploring. One possibility would be through what the report calls tipping, but as described as letting users pay for access to exclusive content, which doesn't sound like a tip, it just sounds like paying for content. Twitter would take a percentage of that, of course. Another would be to charge for a suite of power tools for users, possibly including a paid tier for TweetDeck. Twitter's past user surveys have also floated the idea of further profile customization. You might pay a little extra to get some cool stuff in your profile, especially if you're a business or an undo send feature as a paid offering. Twitter's head of revenue products, Bruce Falk, said in a statement, quote, increasing revenue durability is our top company objective. He also added, we are still in very early exploration and we do not expect any meaningful revenue attributable to these opportunities in 2021. Well, okay, assuming that this isn't gonna happen this year, let's assume that it is going to happen. The whole unsend something sent, I have to assume would just apply to DMs if something hasn't been read and you're able to erase it before it's seen, because everyone knows, you delete a Tweet now, someone's already taken a screenshot, you're not saving anybody. You're certainly not saving yourself. Being able to edit a Tweet, that is a very popular and up until now ignored option. Twitter has done lots of things to evolve over the last decade plus, but editing Tweets has never been an option and a lot of people want that. I think a lot of people would pay for that. I would like other people to pay for that so that I don't always get the follow up Tweet 10 seconds later being like, God typo, I know how to type that, sorry. Just the first Tweet would have been fine or a Tweet that goes away and you're not sure why and then it shows up an hour later when they realize what mistake they've made or that they'd like to change the narrative a bit. Changing the narrative though, and Tom, this might be why you kind of disagree with me on a feature that people would pay for. Does start to hurt the way that Twitter threads work currently? Yeah, first of all, Dorsey said he's not going to do edits. They're not even mentioning it in the story. So editing a Tweet is just not going to happen. Like I've already resigned to myself even though I also would like it. But even if it was among those things that people that would be sold to people, I think people would be upset. People want to be able to edit a Tweet without having to pay for it. And I think Twitter is going to have more likelihood of success selling features to creators to publishers rather than to end users. In other words saying, all right, we'll give you not only analytics but we'll give you powerful Tweet Deck tools and all of this sort of stuff to make the things that you post on Twitter more rich and varied. Maybe editing is part of that. But then I think that upsets people if it's only given to people who pay and not to people who don't. But I think they have to focus on the creation and they could probably sell subscriptions for content creators versus paying, getting people to like pay for, I don't know, minor updates or consumption related things. Yeah, I mean, within Twitter itself, let's say I follow a journalist. This is hypothetical, I follow a journalist and this journalist often breaks stories that are really interesting to me but often those links go to something behind a paywall of sorts. Well, I may pay for that eventual place where the story lives. But if I had an opportunity to keep it within Twitter if for whatever reason that was just the way that I was digesting the news and that person could still be compensated and feel like, hey, this is a place where I've built up a really good audience. This is a more frictionless option for them. I can see if you got a big enough audience. Again, that's the key part of this, it being lucrative. Yeah, I wonder if that would break the format of Twitter though because if you're going to be tipping someone actually paying money, you don't want just, you know, 280 characters analysis of anything, I don't think. You would need something a little bit more meaty. I guess people already do threads, Twitter threads. So maybe there's a way of incorporating that into a longer but it seems like you would need at least a little bit of text or some video or something to be worth tipping for. And I wonder how coherent that is with the product that Twitter is. Well, Twitter recently acquired review, the newsletter company. So I think there's some kind of integration there that could allow for paywall content. I don't think they should call it tipping. I think it's great if they already, if they set up a way for you to pay creators for other things, make tipping an option like an actual tipping of like, I just wanted to give you a dollar because I really enjoy your tweets. Like, I think that's fine. Don't call paying for access to exclusive content. Tipping, please though. I would prefer just me. The Financial Times sources say that TikTok told investors it is ready new e-commerce features in the US. This would include letting popular users automatically earn commissions on shared product links as well as host live streamed shopping where users can buy products featured in the stream without having to leave the app. TikTok launched a similar live stream shopping event in partnership with Walmart late last year. You might remember we talked about it here on this show. And TikTok will supposedly also let brands show catalogs and place their own ads online rather than through a sales representative. Yeah, this makes sense. Duyan already does this in China, which is also owned by ByteDance. It's essentially the version of TikTok that operates in China. So why wouldn't they try to make it launch here and expand their e-commerce offerings? Makes perfect sense. Yeah, I agree. Researchers, I was like, Patrick, in your silence, I felt you nodding. Researchers at the University of Maryland in the US have created transparent wood. Yes, people, you heard me right. That's better insulating than glass is and could make an energy efficient building material in future construction. The researchers brushed a solution of hydrogen peroxide onto a one meter long and one millimeter thick wood plank with a paintbrush, kind of simple stuff. Although the wood does have to be pretty thin. When left in the sun or under a UV lamp for an hour, at least an hour, the wood turned white. Then after brushing a coat of hydrogen peroxide on that opaque wood material and another hour of light exposure, it turned transparent. They then coated the wood with a tough transparent epoxy designed for marine use to harden the wood, fill in spaces, fill in pores, make it sturdy. At this point, 90% of visible light was still passing through and the wood then looked like glass still though with the strength and flexibility of wood. Yeah, as I read it, it was the hydrogen peroxide made it white and then they infused it with the epoxy which made it transparent, which blows my mind that you could just do this in your backyard, right? Like you could just, essentially, if you have the right epoxy and some hydrogen peroxide, you could make windows out of wood. Now, like you said, they do have to be fairly thin to really be transparent, but the pictures in the CBC article we saw, you can see right through it at a leaf like granted. It's thin, but it's probably still more insulating than glass. Yeah, it's 90%, I mean, it's not entirely transparent. You know, 90%, I'm sure in the Middle Ages would have been incredible. Nowadays, 90% is not like you can see it changes the view that you have from the outside. So I don't think it can completely replace glass also. One, you know, I'm in Finland and it's very cold. I suspect one millimeter thick wood will not do much for, so I think it will have, it's the kind of thing that can have very specific uses that will be awesome, but it's not like, oh, this can replace glass, right? It's specific types of places that can make use of it. And for that, it will be great. Yeah, I mean, if you're building a house from scratch and this was available to you as an option, you're not gonna replace all your windows with wood and be like, oh, you just can't see out of them, but they're stronger, but, you know, skylights or, you know, certain, I don't know, accent walls. It sounds like the epoxy is the extremely important part because yes, as sturdy as wood may be when you're talking a millimeter of wood, it's, I mean, glass is thicker than that oftentimes. Then again, I've got non-double-paned glass in my little apartment and boy, is it cold. I would like another alternative. Yeah, this is not a big two by four that you could make transparent. I have to keep reminding myself of that because I'm like, just build a house with wood and then just paint the windows where you want them. It doesn't quite work that way. Yet, yet. Yet, yet. Well, and the CBC article does a great job of explaining how, you know, the peroxide bleaches all the brown stuff. That's why it turns white. And then the epoxy kind of moves in and makes sure that the lignin part of the wood stays, but kind of fills in the spaces so that light isn't bouncing around off the lignin. It can transit all the way through and that's what makes it transparent. It's really fascinating. Thanks to Allison Sheridan who brought the story to our attention. Allison, you are full of great stories. Thank you. Keep them coming. And if you have great stories that might, you think it'd be great to be on DTNS or you've got questions and comments about anything that we talk about, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. 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